Building anticipatory governance of social-ecological tipping points in transformative change planning for ocean sustainability – SURPRISES

With the world facing a looming poly-crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and growing inequalities, there is an urgent need to enable societal transformation for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people. However, what this transformative change looks like and how to achieve it will look different in different contexts and requires taking diverse people, their knowledge systems and aspirations into account. SURPRISES centers on a participatory futures approach to co-develop nature-positive visions under conditions of uncertainty, and to build multiple pathways and actions to achieve these in Africa’s four ocean basins (we will undertake visioning workshops in the western-Indian ocean (WIO), the Benguela, the Gulf of Guinea and adjacent islands, and the Mediterranean). These visions will then be used to scale to a pan-African Ocean vision built on bottom-up indicators and aspirations, with the support of the IUCN’s Great Blue Wall initiative. It emphasizes a transdisciplinary and inclusive approach to include the perspectives of diverse actors, especially those whose voices are marginalized in decision-making, and foregrounds their stories and narratives to engage with more powerful actors. In addition, this project also aims to include the element of ‘surprise’ by engaging with the non-linear dynamics and feedback loops of tipping points leading to irreversible changes in complex systems, to produce scenarios more robust in the face of uncertainties. Our theory of change is that our scenario process and its outcomes would create more anticipatory capacity for improved governance of marine social-ecological systems both in Africa, but also with important learnings for other places, both marine and terrestrial. It would do so both by building aspirational futures through which to orient actions as well as by unpacking disruptive surprise events that could have irreversible impacts on the wellbeing of people and nature. Our participatory scenarios will combine the Nature Futures Framework by the IPBES Task Force on Scenarios and Models, with the Seeds of Good Anthropocenes. We will focus on anticipatory and systemic risk governance capacities that enable actors to effectively deal with the risk and opportunities of non-linear changes in the complex systems they are part of (tipping points). These storylines will then be used to inform storylines in global models. The findings from this project will not only be methodologically relevant for other cases, but the outputs and concrete governance actions to enable positive transformation and to avoid negative transformations or tipping points will be relevant beyond the case studies. Operating at regional basin level and then scaling to the continent will allow for multi-scale decision_x0002_making tools and options to be developed.